Meticulous but one-dimensional.
How the correspondence among three volunteer detectives and a self-proclaimed serial killer helped solve long-standing murder investigations.
Michaud (The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey into the Minds of Sexual Predators, 1999, etc.) has made a career of penning splashy true-crime books, and Price is an experienced newspaper journalist. Their first book together never strays far from the facts. A three-man cold-case squad of former law-enforcement agents in Colorado decided one morning in 2002 to pick up the trail of Robert Browne, who was serving a life sentence for the murder of a 13-year-old girl. Browne had been mailing the police cryptic messages of rhyming verse that made references to many other victims. Retired FBI officer Charlie Hess suggested writing Browne a letter, and the other men agreed that even if the con’s claims proved false, they had nothing to lose by trying. Four years later, their efforts paid off when Browne confessed and pleaded guilty to a murder he had committed two decades earlier. Clear, clipped prose and vivid descriptions of the cases never bring readers close enough to the killer or his thoughts. Neither Browne nor Hess was interviewed for the book, so the information is parsed from the letters they exchanged, conversations with other officers and Browne’s terrified ex-wives. A loner with a history of drug use, violence and robbery, Browne made no secret of his disdain for women but never illuminated his reasons for murdering what he, at one point, claimed were 48 victims. The lack of hard evidence to corroborate most of his confessions is another letdown, though the book offers a thorough examination of the challenge police face in following up on old crimes.
Meticulous but one-dimensional.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-425-21727-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.
A powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.
If a boy is not born a monster, how does he become one? Though Backderf (Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, 2008) was once an Ohio classmate of the notorious Jeffrey Dahmer, he doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for “Jeff.” Yet he walks an emotional tightrope here, for he recognizes that someone—maybe the other kids who laughed at and with him, certainly the adults who should have recognized aberration well beyond tortured adolescence—should have done something. “To you Dahmer was a depraved fiend but to me he was a kid I sat next to in study hall and hung out with in the band room,” writes the author, whose dark narrative proceeds to show how Dahmer’s behavior degenerated from fascination with roadkill and torture of animals to repressed homosexuality and high-school alcoholism to mass murder. It also shows how he was shaken by his parents’ troubled marriage and tempestuous divorce, by his emotionally disturbed mother’s decision to move away and leave her son alone, and by the encouragement of the Jeffrey Dahmer Fan Club (with the author a charter member and ringleader) to turn the outcast into a freak show. The more that Dahmer drank to numb his life, the more oblivious adults seemed to be, letting him disappear between the cracks. “It’s my belief that Dahmer didn’t have to wind up a monster, that all those people didn’t have to die horribly, if only the adults in his life hadn’t been so inexplicably, unforgivably, incomprehensibly clueless and/or indifferent,” writes Backderf. “Once Dahmer kills, however—and I can’t stress this enough—my sympathy for him ends.”
An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4197-0216-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.
Godfrey reconstructs a horrific murder with a vividness found in the finest fiction, without ever sacrificing journalistic integrity.
The novel The Torn Skirt (2002) showed how well the author could capture the roiling inner life of a teenager. She brings that sensibility to bear in this account of the 1997 murder of a 14-year-old girl in British Columbia, a crime for which seven teenage girls and one boy were charged. While there’s no more over-tilled literary soil than that of the shocking murder in a small town, Godfrey manages to portray working-class View Royal in a fresh manner. The victim, Reena Virk, was a problematic kid. Rebelling against her Indian parents’ strict religiosity, she desperately mimicked the wannabe gangsta mannerisms of her female schoolmates, who repaid her idolization by ignoring her. The circumstances leading up to the murder seem completely trivial: a stolen address book, a crush on the wrong guy. But popular girls like Josephine and Kelly had created a vast, imaginary world (mostly stolen from mafia movies and hip-hop) in which they were wildly desired and feared. In this overheated milieu, reality was only a distant memory, and everything was allowed. The murder and cover-up are chilling. Godfrey parcels out details piecemeal in the words of the teens who took part or simply watched. None of them seemed to quite comprehend what was going on, why it happened or even—in a few cases—what the big deal was. The tone veers close to melodrama, but in this context it works, since the author is telling the story from the inside out, trying to approximate the relentlessly self-dramatizing world these kids inhabited. Given most readers’ preference for easily explained and neatly concluded crime narratives, Godfrey’s resolute refusal to impose false order on the chaos of a murder spawned by rumors and lies is commendable.
A tour-de-force of true crime reportage.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-1091-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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